ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Backroom dealing will play as big a role as mass rallies and campaign speeches in Pakistan’s Feb. 18 elections, with the three main parties already feeling out one another for potential alliances in the face of a likely hung parliament.
The quiet negotiations are feeding a widespread sense of cynicism, with many analysts and disillusioned voters predicting the outcome will be fixed or the elections will not be held at all.
Leaders of the governing Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q), allied with President Pervez Musharraf, acknowledge they are unlikely to retain the majority they now hold in the 272-seat parliament and already have begun seeking allies.
Particular targets include members of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which appears rudderless since the assassination last month of its leader, Benazir Bhutto. Led by Mrs. Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, and its lackluster vice chairman, Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the party already has indicated it may be willing to work with the PML-Q — something Mrs. Bhutto had ruled out before her death.
PML-Q spokesman Tariq Azeem said in an interview that the party leadership is amenable to strategic alliances within the parliament and has even begun discussing the feasibility of a national-unity government.
“Do the math, and you find that PML-Q will still emerge as the single-largest party. It seems it will be a hung parliament, and there will be a coalition of the willing. But who will be willing, we’ll have to wait and see,” Mr. Azeem said.
The chances of a PML-Q alliance with the PPP are limited by Mr. Zardari’s hostility toward the government. He still holds it responsible for the death of Mrs. Bhutto. Mr. Fahim is presumed to be more open to a coalition.
Some PPP members accuse government intelligence agencies of gathering material to blackmail winning members into changing parties after the election. They say the PML-Q was able to convert 20 PPP members through such tactics after the last election in 2002, thus securing its majority.
“Benazir Bhutto and the Bhutto name are the central thread that kept the beads together. The thread is gone, and many think the party will fall apart,” said Farhatullah Babar, a longtime PPP member and a de facto spokesman.
“In the end, the party has survived all these onslaughts,” he said, “and we know the establishment will launch another attack after the elections, but [Mr. Musharraf] cannot break the party as easily as he did in 2002.”
The third major party is the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), a smaller but still potent political force led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Mr. Sharif and his brother, Shahbaz, the party chairman, have been barred from running personally but continue to direct the party’s campaign.
Mr. Sharif has attached himself to Mrs. Bhutto’s memory as something of a partner and mentor: On the day of her assassination, he reached the Rawalpindi General Hospital even before the police, and his copious grief and outrage provided reusable sound bites to Pakistan’s 24-hour news channels.
He has also replaced Mrs. Bhutto as the sharpest critic of Mr. Musharraf, but unlike her, he appears to be reaching out to Islamists who resent the president’s support of U.S. efforts in the war on terrorism.
“Musharraf has destroyed Pakistan. He is blindly following America’s orders” by sending the army to fight Islamists in the areas bordering Afghanistan, Mr. Sharif told some 3,000 supporters yesterday, according to the Associated Press. “The whole of Pakistan is drowned in blood.”
Mr. Sharif also accused the government of brutality when it raided a pro-Taliban mosque and female seminary in Islamabad last year, according to the AP account. The army left “girls riddled with bullets” in the attack, he reportedly charged.
However the pre-election maneuvering works out, there is deep-seated skepticism among many Pakistanis that the balloting will be either free or fair.
Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Mahmud Ali Durrani, told The Washington Times last week that election officials have installed a number of safeguards and reforms — including computerized voter lists, tamper-proof ballots and early publication of all polling stations — to ensure that the vote “will [be] the best-run election in our history.”
But Pakistan’s most prominent human rights lawyer, Asma Jahangir, said she believes the elections — already delayed by several weeks since the Bhutto assassination — will be postponed again if the PML-Q cannot build enough alliances with PPP legislators.
“If by [February] 18th, Musharraf and his party have made deals with the other political parties and are assured that they will have a majority, then perhaps we will have elections,” she said bleakly over a cup of tea in her Lahore office.
“If they are not assured, then am I afraid the elections will not take place.”
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